I love being a lower league football fan. I love the atmosphere and the sense of community you get from supporting your local club. I love that my club needs my support as much as I need my weekly shot of football. You don’t really get that in the Premiership, if you don’t go then there are thousands of fans willing to take your seat. At Southend, 2^nd in League Two, we have to put ticket prices down to a fiver to get near a 10,000 crowd. In the Premiership two teams flirting with the relegation places played in front of 17,000 at the weekend and that’s a team with the lowest average attendance in the Premiership.

Everton, one of the self-proclaimed paupers in the Premiership complains because they can’t afford to buy new players. Southend last brought a player 2 years ago and I think we paid for him with tuppence and a bag of old rope. We struggle to pay our staff, and by staff I mean the guys earning minimum wage to flip burgers.

My point is this; there is already a massive gulf between the lower league teams and the Premiership and yet in the past couple of weeks we have had the following from them at the top;

A call to make sure the top teams (presumably Ian Ayre means teams that don’t qualify for the Champions League) get significantly more of the foreign television money than the rest.

A call by foreign owners to get rid of relegation and promotion.

The passing of the Elite Player Performance Plan

Fortunately the first two are just wishful thinking but it gives you a little window into the attitude at the top. What this says to me is that the Premiership owners and chairmen are not interested in football. They don’t care about football at all. They are not interested in sport or in a fair competition. What they see is a cash cow, one they want to milk by turning the Premiership from a competition into a Hollywood film in which Goliath always wins. They don’t want drama, they want it to be predictable, a graph that forever points skywards.

My old school had a slogan, ‘make our best better’ – I always had a problem with this slogan. Never mind the best, what about the rest? What about all the people that NEED the help, shouldn’t you be helping them?

That is what is happening with the Premiership right now, they are doing everything in their substantial power to maximise their profit margins and shit on everyone below them. This brings us nicely to the passing of the EPPP.

After our poor showing at the World Cup the FA and the Premier League did a bit of thinking and asked why, with the quality of the Premiership as it is, are we so crap when it comes to our national team? They came up with the Elite Player Performance Plan (EPPP). Although the EPPP will affect every league club, it was drawn up by members and employees of just the Premier League. Of the Premier League only six teams were represented in discussions, with Arsenal, Manchester United and Chelsea among them. To call this representative of the whole football league is to call the stork representative of an apple.

Without going into the details of the EPPP, partly because I can find no publication of it on the FA’s website and partly because this post is already in danger of a TLDR tag, the two key points for lower league football fans are;

Clubs with Category 3 or lower academies are barred from working with players until they reached the age of 12. (Category 1&2 academies must have a minimum of 17 staff and will cost around 2mil a year to run)

Under the new compensation formula the selling club would simply receive a set figure for each year the player has spent in their academy. For example, when Everton signed the 16-year-old defender Luke Garbutt from Leeds United in 2009 a tribunal ordered them to pay an initial £600,000; under the new system this would have been capped at a maximum of £131,000.

Other than a few Premiership clubs no one can afford to run these category 1 and 2 academies. So how convenient is it that the EPPP gives these elite teams the pick of the players before any of the other teams get a chance. Under old rules teams were limited to players within a 90 mile radius so there was some protection but that’s been scrapped as well so now the elite can come and steal your kids no matter what part of the country you are in. There is no longer anything local about your local club but that shouldn’t bother Arsenal fans.

Should a young player slip through the dolphin unfriendly net and, heaven forbid, end up learning their trade from the bottom up then the Premier League elite have stacked the cards in their favour here as well.

Under the old system lower league clubs have been able to argue their case and receive fair compensation for their players. It isn’t unheard of for teams to claim six and seven-figure sums when the Premiership comes a poaching. No more, under the new proposals teams with a Category 3 academy will receive £12.5k per year. So Southend, who recently lost youths to Fulham and Liverpool, will go from being compensated with six-figure sums to being lucky to claim £50k.

Teams like Southend rely on receiving decent compensation for the hard work they have put in developing players. We really can’t afford to run a youth academy but we do so because when players come through the system that are good enough the money we receive helps to keep the club alive. Manchester United turnover some £300mil a year, what is it to them if they pay 50 or 500 thousand pounds for a player? Yet this money keeps our clubs alive. We are not talking about lower league clubs trying to hold Premiership clubs to ransom, we are talking about survival.

Speaking of holding clubs to ransom; in order to make sure the EPPP was passed the Premier League withheld part of its annual solidarity payment to the Football League since the summer, until the motion was passed. So in order to get their way, the rich Premier League blackmailed the lower leagues into agreeing to give away their youth team players at a massively reduced rate by withholding money they knew some clubs could not afford to survive without. The word you are looking for is scum. Total and utter scum.

These new proposals will help no one in the long run. Youth development centres will close, lower league football clubs may go under. In the end there will be less young players coming through the system and English football will suffer. Sure we will make our best better but what about the rest of us?